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Theodor W. Adorno

Culture Industry Reconsidered

The term culture industry was perhaps used for the first time in the book Dialectic of
Enlightenment, which Horkheimer and I published in Amsterdam in 1947. In our drafts we
spoke of 'mass culture'. We replaced that expression with 'culture industry' in order to exclude
from the outset the interpretation agreeable to its advocates: that it is a matter of something
like a culture that arises spontaneously from the masses themselves, the contemporary form of
popular art. From the latter the culture industry must be distinguished in the extreme. The
culture industry fuses the old and familiar into a new quality. In all its branches, products
which are tailored for consumption by masses, and which to a great extent determine the
nature of that consumption, are manufactured more or less according to plan. The individual
branches are similar in structure or at least fit into each other, ordering themselves into a
system almost without a gap. This is made possible by contemporary technical capabilities as
well as by economic and administrative concentration. The culture industry intentionally
integrates its consumers from above. To the detriment of both it forces together the spheres of
high and low art, separated for thousands of years. The seriousness of high art is destroyed in
speculation about its efficacy; the seriousness of the lower perishes with the civilizational
constraints imposed on the rebellious resistance inherent within it as long as social control
was not yet total. Thus, although the culture industry undeniably speculates on the conscious
and unconscious state of the millions towards which it is directed, the masses are not primary,
but secondary, they are an object of calculation; an appendage of the machinery. The
customer is not king, as the culture industry would have us believe, not its subject but its
object. The very word mass-media, specially honed for the culture industry, already shifts the
accent onto harmless terrain. Neither is it a question of primary concern for the masses, nor of
the techniques of communication as such, but of the spirit which sufllates them, their master's
voice. The culture industry misuses its concern for the masses in order to duplicate, reinforce
and strengthen their mentality, which it presumes is given and unchangeable. How this
mentality might be changed is excluded throughout. The masses are not the measure but the
ideology of the culture industry, even though the culture industry itself could scarcely exist
without adapting to the masses.
The cultural commodities of the industry are governed, as Brecht and Suhrkamp expressed it
thirty years ago, by the principle of their realization as value, and not by their own specific
content and harmonious formation. The entire practice of the culture industry transfers the
profit motive naked onto cultural forms. Ever since these cultural forms first began to earn a
living for their creators as commodities in the market-place they had already possessed
something of this quality. But then they sought after profit only indirectly, over and above
their autonomous essence. New on the part of the culture industry is the direct and
undisguised primacy of a precisely and thoroughly calculated efficacy in its most typical
products. The autonomy of works of art, which of course rarely ever predominated in an
entirely pure form, and was always permeated by a constellation of effects, is tendentially
eliminated by the culture industry, with or without the conscious will of those in control. The
latter include both those who carry out directives as well as those who hold the power. In
economic terms they are or were in search of new opportunities for the realization of capital
in the most economically developed countries. The old opportunities became increasingly
more precarious as a result of the same concentration process which alone makes the culture
industry possible as an omnipresent phenomenon. Culture, in the true sense, did not simply
accommodate itself to human beings; but it always simultaneously raised a protest against the
petrified relations under which they lived, thereby honoring them. In so far as culture
becomes wholly assimilated to and integrated in those petrified relations, human beings are
once more debased. Cultural entities typical of the culture industry are no longer also
commodities, they are commodities through and through. This quantitative shift is so great
that it calls forth entirely new phenomena. Ultimately, the culture industry no longer even
needs to directly pursue everywhere the profit interests from which it originated. These
interests have become objectified in its ideology and have even made themselves independent
of the compulsion to sell the cultural commodities which must be swallowed anyway. The
culture industry turns into public relations, the manufacturing of 'goodwill' per se, without
regard for particular firms or saleable objects. Brought to bear is a general uncritical
consensus, advertisements produced for the world, so that each product of the culture industry
becomes its own advertisement.
Nevertheless, those characteristics which originally stamped the transformation of literature
into a commodity are maintained in this process. More than anything in the world, the culture
industry has its ontology, a scaffolding of rigidly conservative basic categories which can be
gleaned, for example, from the commercial English novels of the late seventeenth and early
eighteenth centuries. What parades as progress in the culture industry, as the incessantly new
which it offers up, remains the disguise for an eternal sameness; everywhere the changes
mask a skeleton which has changed just as little as the profit motive itself since the time it
first gained its predominance over culture.
Thus, the expression 'industry' is not to be taken too literally. It refers to the standardization of
the thing itself - such as that of the Western, familiar to every movie-goer - and to the
rationalization of distribution techniques, but not strictly to the production process. Although
in film, the central sector of the culture industry, the production process resembles technical
modes of operation in the extensive division of labor, the employment of machines and the
separation of the laborers from the means of production - expressed in the perennial conflict
between artists active in the culture industry and those who control it - individual forms of
production are nevertheless maintained. Each product affects an individual air; individuality
itself serves to reinforce ideology, in so far as the illusion is conjured up that the completely
reified and mediated is a sanctuary from immediacy and life. Now, as ever, the culture
industry exists in the 'service' of third persons, maintaining its affinity to the declining
circulation process of capital, to the commerce from which it came into being. Its ideology
above all makes use of the star system, borrowed from individualistic art and its commercial
exploitation. The more dehumanized its methods of operation and content, the more diligently
and successfully the culture industry propagates supposedly great personalities and operates
with heart-throbs. It is industrial more in a sociological sense, in the incorporation of
industrial forms of organization even when nothing is manufactured - as in the rationalization
of office work - rather than in the sense of anything really and actually produced by
technological rationality. Accordingly, the misinvestments of the culture industry are
considerable, throwing those branches rendered obsolete by new techniques into crises, which
seldom lead to changes for the better.
The concept of technique in the culture industry is only in name identical with technique in
works of art. In the latter, technique is concerned with the internal organization of the object
itself, with its inner logic. In contrast, the technique of the culture industry is, from the
beginning, one of distribution and mechanical reproduction, and therefore always remains
external to its object. The culture industry finds ideological support precisely in so far as it
carefully shields itself from the full potential of the techniques contained in its products. It
lives parasitically from the extra-artistic technique of the material production of goods,
without regard for the obligation to the internal artistic whole implied by its functionality
(Sachlichkeit), but also without concern for the laws of form demanded by aesthetic
autonomy. The result for the physiognomy of the culture industry is essentially a mixture of
streamlining, photographic hardness and precision on the one hand, and individualistic
residues, sentimentality and an already rationally disposed and adapted romanticism on the
other. Adopting Benjamin's designation of the traditional work of art by the concept of aura,
the presence of that which is not present, the culture industry is defined by the fact that it does
not strictly counterpose another principle to that of aura, but rather by the fact that it
conserves the decaying aura as a foggy mist. By this means the culture industry betrays its
own ideological abuses.
It has recently become customary among cultural officials as well as sociologists to warn
against underestimating the culture industry while pointing to its great importance for the
development of the consciousness of its consumers. It is to be taken seriously, without
cultured snobbism. In actuality the culture industry is important as a moment of the spirit
which dominates today. Whoever ignores its influence out of skepticism for what it stuffs into
people would be naive. Yet there is a deceptive glitter about the admonition to take it
seriously. Because of its social role, disturbing questions about its quality, about truth or
untruth, and about the aesthetic niveau of the culture industry's emissions are repressed, or at
least excluded from the so-called sociology of communications. The critic is accused of
taking refuge in arrogant esoterica. It would be advisable first to indicate the double meaning
of importance that slowly worms its way in unnoticed. Even if it touches the lives of
innumerable people, the function of something is no guarantee of its particular quality. The
blending of aesthetics with its residual communicative aspects leads art, as a social
phenomenon, not to its rightful position in opposition to alleged artistic snobbism, but rather
in a variety of ways to the defense of its baneful social consequences. The importance of the
culture industry in the spiritual constitution of the masses is no dispensation for reflection on
its objective legitimation, its essential being, least of all by a science which thinks itself
pragmatic. On the contrary: such reflection becomes necessary precisely for this reason. To
take the culture industry as seriously as its unquestioned role demands, means to take it
seriously critically, and not to cower in the face of its monopolistic character.
Among those intellectuals anxious to reconcile themselves with the phenomenon and eager to
find a common formula to express both their reservations against it and their respect for its
power, a tone of ironic toleration prevails unless they have already created a new mythos of
the twentieth century from the imposed regression. After all, those intellectuals maintain,
everyone knows what pocket novels, films off the rack, family television shows rolled out
into serials and hit parades, advice to the lovelorn and horoscope columns are all about. All of
this, however, is harmless and, according to them, even democratic since it responds to a
demand, albeit a stimulated one. It also bestows all kinds of blessings, they point out, for
example, through the dissemination of information, advice and stress reducing patterns of
behavior. Of course, as every sociological study measuring something as elementary as how
politically informed the public is has proven, the information is meager or indifferent.
Moreover, the advice to be gained from manifestations of the culture industry is vacuous,
banal or worse, and the behavior patterns are shamelessly conformist.
The two-faced irony in the relationship of servile intellectuals to the culture industry is not
restricted to them alone. It may also be supposed that the consciousness of the consumers
themselves is split between the prescribed fun which is supplied to them by the culture
industry and a not particularly well- hidden doubt about its blessings. The phrase, the world
wants to be deceived, has become truer than had ever been intended. People are not only, as
the saying goes, falling for the swindle; if it guarantees them even the most fleeting
gratification they desire a deception which is nonetheless transparent to them. They force their
eyes shut and voice approval, in a kind of self-loathing, for what is meted out to them,
knowing fully the purpose for which it is manufactured. Without admitting it they sense that
their lives would be completely intolerable as soon as they no longer clung to satisfactions
which are none at all.
The most ambitious defense of the culture industry today celebrates its spirit, which might be
safely called ideology, as an ordering factor. In a supposedly chaotic world it provides human
beings with something like standards for orientation, and that alone seems worthy of approval.
However, what its defenders imagine is preserved by the culture industry is in fact all the
more thoroughly destroyed by it. The color film demolishes the genial old tavern to a greater
extent than bombs ever could: the film exterminates its imago. No homeland can survive
being processed by the films which celebrate it, and which thereby turn the unique character
on which it thrives into an interchangeable sameness.
That which legitimately could be called culture attempted, as an expression of suffering and
contradiction, to maintain a grasp on the idea of the good life. Culture cannot represent either
that which merely exists or the conventional and no longer binding categories of order which
the culture industry drapes over the idea of the good life as if existing reality were the good
life, and as if those categories were its true measure. If the response of the culture industry's
representatives is that it does not deliver art at all, this is itself the ideology with which they
evade responsibility for that from which the business lives. No misdeed is ever righted by
explaining it as such.
The appeal to order alone, without concrete specificity, is futile; the appeal to the
dissemination of norms, without these ever proving themselves in reality or before
consciousness, is equally futile. The idea of an objectively binding order, huckstered to people
because it is so lacking for them, has no claims if it does not prove itself internally and in
confrontation with human beings. But this is precisely what no product of the culture industry
would engage in. The concepts of order which it hammers into human beings are always those
of the status quo. They remain unquestioned, unanalyzed and undialectically presupposed,
even if they no longer have any substance for those who accept them. In contrast to the
Kantian, the categorical imperative of the culture industry no longer has anything in common
with freedom. It proclaims: you shall conform, without instruction as to what; conform to that
which exists anyway, and to that which everyone thinks anyway as a reflex of its power and
omnipresence. The power of the culture industry╒s ideology is such that conformity has
replaced consciousness. The order that springs from it is never confronted with what it claims
to be or with the real interests of human beings. Order, however, is not good in itself. It would
be so only as a good order. The fact that the culture industry is oblivious to this and extols
order in abstracto, bears witness to the impotence and untruth of the messages it conveys.
While it claims to lead the perplexed, it deludes them with false conflicts which they are to
exchange for their own. It solves conflicts for them only in appearance, in a way that they can
hardly be solved in their real lives. In the products of the culture industry human beings get
into trouble only so that they can be rescued unharmed, usually by representatives of a
benevolent collective; and then in empty harmony, they are reconciled with the general,
whose demands they had experienced at the outset as irreconcilable with their interests. For
this purpose the culture industry has developed formulas which even reach into such non-
conceptual areas as light musical entertainment. Here too one gets into a 'jam', into rhythmic
problems, which can be instantly disentangled by the triumph of the basic beat.
Even its defenders, however, would hardly contradict Plato openly who maintained that what
is objectively and intrinsically untrue cannot also be subjectively good and true for human
beings. The concoctions of the culture industry are neither guides for a blissful life, nor a new
art of moral responsibility, but rather exhortations to toe the line, behind which stand the most
powerful interests. The consensus which it propagates strengthens blind, opaque authority. If
the culture industry is measured not by its own substance and logic, but by its efficacy, by its
position in reality and its explicit pretensions; if the focus of serious concern is with the
efficacy to which it always appeals, the potential of its effect becomes twice as weighty. This
potential, however, lies in the promotion and exploitation of the ego-weakness to which the
powerless members of contemporary society, with its concentration of power, are condemned.
Their consciousness is further developed retrogressively. It is no coincidence that cynical
American film producers are heard to say that their pictures must take into consideration the
level of eleven-year-olds. In doing so they would very much like to make adults into eleven-
year-olds.
It is true that thorough research has not, for the time being, produced an airtight case proving
the regressive effects of particular products of the culture industry. No doubt an imaginatively
designed experiment could achieve this more successfully than the powerful financial
interests concerned would find comfortable. In any case, it can be assumed without hesitation
that steady drops hollow the stone, especially since the system of the culture industry that
surrounds the masses tolerates hardly any deviation and incessantly drills the same formulas
on behavior. Only their deep unconscious mistrust, the last residue of the difference between
art and empirical reality in the spiritual make-up of the masses explains why they have not, to
a person, long since perceived and accepted the world as it is constructed for them by the
culture industry. Even if its messages were as harmless as they are made out to be - on
countless occasions they are obviously not harmless, like the movies which chime in with
currently popular hate campaigns against intellectuals by portraying them with the usual
stereotypes - the attitudes which the culture industry calls forth are anything but harmless. If
an astrologer urges his readers to drive carefully on a particular day, that certainly hurts no
one; they will, however, be harmed indeed by the stupefication which lies in the claim that
advice which is valid every day and which is therefore idiotic, needs the approval of the stars.
Human dependence and servitude, the vanishing point of the culture industry, could scarcely
be more faithfully described than by the American interviewee who was of the opinion that
the dilemmas of the contemporary epoch would end if people would simply follow the lead of
prominent personalities. In so far as the culture industry arouses a feeling of well-being that
the world is precisely in that order suggested by the culture industry, the substitute
gratification which it prepares for human beings cheats them out of the same happiness which
it deceitfully projects. The total effect of the culture industry is one of anti- enlightenment, in
which, as Horkheimer and I have noted, enlightenment, that is the progressive technical
domination of nature, becomes mass deception and is turned into a means for fettering
consciousness. It impedes the development of autonomous, independent individuals who
judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a
democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and
develop. If the masses have been unjustly reviled from above as masses, the culture industry
is not among the least responsible for making them into masses and then despising them,
while obstructing the emancipation for which human beings are as ripe as the productive
forces of the epoch permit.